Many important and sensitive transactions take place each day on computing systems and networks, and many computing systems host sensitive data. From financial transactions large and small to medical data, legal data, and even classified data, large quantities of sensitive information are sent through networks and stored to disks. One very common method of security for this data, both in motion and in storage, is encryption. Sensitive files and messages are converted into an obscured form that can only be read by a computing system with the corresponding decryption key. Unsurprisingly, malicious actors are constantly attempting to find new and better ways of breaking encryption in order to access sensitive data for a wide variety of malicious purposes.
One way of breaking encryption is known as a timing attack. A malicious script that can determine the amount of time it takes for an encryption algorithm to access address tables used to encrypt data may gain significant insight into the encryption key used and may therefore break the encryption far more easily. Malicious scripts can also leverage timing data to perform other malicious activities, such as locating the memory addresses of system functionality for later exploitation. Unfortunately, traditional systems for protecting computing systems do not typically protect against timing attacks. The instant disclosure, therefore, identifies and addresses a need for systems and methods for altering time data.